Review: LakehouseRanch’s ‘Boomer’ gets company off to a perfectly absurd season opener

A man and woman dressed alike – gray non-descript sweatshirts and sweatpants – are already on stage as the audience settles in for LakehouseRanchDotPng’s production of Robert Kerr’s “Have You Seen Boomer?”

They are seated toward the front of the stage on a wooden box in the shape of a cube. The 1959 dreamy nostalgic tune “Sleep Walk” by Betsy Brye loops in the background.

When the lights go up, we see that there are multiple wooden cubes on stage. Handwritten in black marker on each are identifiers of rooms in a house – kitchen, dining room, bathroom, computer room.

A single light bulb hangs from the ceiling. It’s all very mundane.

The man, Marc (Richard K. Weber) is walking from room to room. “Jess? Jess? Jessica?” In spite of how contained the space looks, the way Marc can’t find his wife makes it seem like it’s a cavernous home. Jessica (Bianca Utset) hollers that she’s in the kitchen. He bellows back, “the where?” “The kitchen,” she says.

He’s concerned about their cat Boomer. “Have you seen Boomer?” He’s been missing for days. She still can’t hear him. “Please come here so I don’t have to shout,” she tells him.

This is the world of Marc and Jess, a twentysomething married couple whose relationship will play out in 14 scenes in Kerr’s inventive 90-minute play.

“Have You Seen Boomer?” opens LakehouseRanchDotPng’s third season, and it is the first show in the company’s new home at the Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes. The company, which bills itself as absurdist and experimental, spent its first two seasons at the small Artistic Vibes in East Kendall.

Kerr’s play is a perfect season opener, where the group first presented it as a staged reading in July of 2023. Now it comes to life in all of its repetition and containment in the intimate yet more open space of the Main Street Playhouse, which allows the play room to breathe and unravel.

“Boomer” most entirely fits the definition of Theater of the Absurd, following in the meaning of life – or lack thereof – plots of the masters of the absurd movement such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Plays that spring from the philosophy of French existentialist Albert Camus’s notion that the absurdity of the human condition is in living a meaningful life in a meaningless universe.

And this is where we find our couple – trapped in the monotony of day to day. They make dinner – there’s always a salad with one of three dressings which sparks conversation. There are no real dishes, silverware, or any table setting. In fact, the actors don’t even mime serving each other or eating. When Jess stands making dinner, for instance, she’s not stirring a pot or pretending to take a dish out of a cabinet. She stands with her back to the audience. There is a purposeful meaning to this action — that even the most mundane tasks are even too mundane to play act.

Karina Batchelor-Gomez’s skillful direction creates a whole world in an environment that is as stark as possible. The set, by scenic artist, Indy Sulliero, is a collection of white walls, which adds to the tediousness.

But the production is anything but monotonous. Batchelor-Gomez provides moments of interest. At the start of each scene, the couple walks toward the back wall and circles each other – sometimes smiling, other times not even looking at each other.

Using the back wall of the white set, Jessica marks off the scenes in black chalk reminiscent of the way a prisoner would create tally marks only she writes numbers.

There’s no eraser, so she uses her sweatshirt sleeve to erase the prior scene’s numeral. There’s really not numeric linearity. That too is an illusion. Kerr’s “Boomer” is meant to be, he writes in his script, “a play in three million four hundred twenty-five thousand eight hundred and sixty and a half scenes.”

Marc and Jessica appear to be a satisfied couple. Newly married but not so new that they aren’t yet settled in, they discuss over and over again a canoe trip they’ve orchestrated for a group of friends. And as discussions continue in different scenes about those friends, jealousy rears its head. They decide that their relationship might be better if they had a baby.

Their life, as simple as it is meant to be portrayed, however, is not at all.

“Boomer” is a challenging, multi-layered play. Kerr has written the same scenes to play over and over again, but he also takes us on a journey of Marc and Jessica’s relationship – where underlying jealousies bubble up, where secrets are revealed and, they are pushed to realize that maybe their reality was all smoke and mirrors. Perhaps it’s why at the end of almost every scene, one of the characters asks the other, “do you smell smoke?” As the lights dim and between each scene, a snippet of the haunting Pied Pipers 1945 “Dream” plays.

Weber as Marc and Utset as Jessica have the difficult task of bringing life to complicated characters who have to present themselves as one dimensional. But the characters, are in fact, multi-dimensional and the two actors more than succeed in creating this and make it all work when they have much going against them – no props, a purposefully sparse set, drab colored clothes, no shoes and barefoot.

As a couple, the pair has just the right amount of chemistry but also know where they need to be siloed off from one another in order for the audience to become invested in their emotions.

Batchelor-Gomez smartly makes sure the pacing of the show overcomes what could be routine. There’s skillful work in movement and intimacy director Nicole Perry’s bedroom scenes with the couple are some of the best and contain riotously comic moments.

Brandon Urrutia, the artistic director of the company, is co-lighting designer along with Maleeha Nasser, who also is costume designer. Pam Cartwright is production manager.

While “Have You Seen Boomer?” is meant to be theater of the absurd, it’s not so out there that it isn’t relatable. Who hasn’t felt like their relationship, and for that matter, their life is some sort of alternative reality and as repetitious as “Groundhog Day.”

With this third season opener, LakehouseRanchDotPng once again proves that they found their niche. And now they’ve found a new home. “Have You Seen Boomer?” is a great way to get acquainted with this relatively new group that is becoming a formidable force in South Florida’s theater landscape.

If you go:

WHAT: Robert Kerr’s “Have You Seen Boomer?”

WHERE: Main Street Playhouse, 6812 Main St., Miami Lakes

WHEN: 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through Sunday, Sept. 1.

COST: $20.

INFORMATION: 786-427-4721 and lakehouseranchdotpng.com

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